20 students and USAS staff members were arrested Saturday attempting to shut down the REI store in Rockville, Maryland as part of a national day of action in about 30 locations of the sporting goods chain. Their demand: that REI cut ties with North Face over the refusal of North Face’s parent corporation, VF Corporation, to sign on to the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yALY3pWmH_I]
On this Saturday, students across the United States are asking you to join them in a national day of actions at outlets of REI, a sporting goods chain. In places like Rockville, Maryland (see below) or Seattle, Washington, they will be asking REI to do its part to support worker safety in Bangladesh.
In order to understand why students are protesting REI, we need to follow the money from Rockville and Seattle to Dhaka and Narayanganj in Bangladesh.
The graphic above shows the path of the cash which leaves the consumers’ hand for the registers of REI. REI, in turn, pays Greensboro-NC-based VF Corporation for the backpacks, pants, sleeping bags, and other goods it stocks. VF Corporation, in turn, has contracted out the work to produce its goods to factories in Bangladesh like Medlar Apparels and Optimum Fashion (pdf). Finally, these factories have pushed their workers, for extremely low pay and long hours, to produce the goods on time and with sufficient quality; in exchange the workers receive a very small percentage of the total cost the consumer paid.
Bangladesh’s garment industry is experiencing a crisis in terms of building safety and other, very basic measures of worker well being. This crisis was concretized in the collapse of Rana Plaza, a multistory building where over 1,100 workers died in April 2013.
There are two main efforts right now to try to establish basic conditions like ‘the building won’t burn down’ in Bangladesh’s garment sector. The first is the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, which, according to USAS, is a legally binding agreement between brands and legitimate representatives of workers in Bangladesh. Importantly, the Accord includes unionizing and other worker organizing into the basic framework for improving building safety; as such, it recognizes that worker organizing is important not just in and of itself, but also vital for ensuring that worker concerns about building safety are heard.
The alternative to the Accord is a company sponsored effort called the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety. The Alliance is an initiative spearheaded primarily by American corporations like Wal-Mart and lacks the teeth that the Accord has. Most importantly, it does not have the same practical commitment to the importance of worker organizing.
Back to this Saturday. What USAS is asking consumers–asking you to do –is to use the leverage that you have over REI by requesting that REI remove VF Corporation’s goods from its shelves. If successful, this would put further pressure on VF Corporation to sign up to the stronger measure, the Accord, and thus lend support to active worker organizing efforts in Bangladesh by legitimate representatives.
It may sound complicated, but it boils down to a very simple fact: in that diagram above, the consumers are the only group of people besides the workers themselves that can be reliably asked to take the side of labor. If you can, show up at an REI near you to support Bangladeshi workers on Saturday. Here’s the announcement for the DC area action:
Take Action at REI in Rockville, MD to End Deathtrap Working Conditions in Bangladesh
Who: United Students Against Sweatshops, the nation’s largest student-run organization supporting workers rights, and YOU!
What: Since 2005, more than 1,800 garment workers have died in preventable factory fires and building collapses in Bangladesh. In the wake of these disasters and in the face of massive pressure from consumers, over 175 apparel brands have signed the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a legally-binding agreement between brands and unions that holds the promise of bringing an end to mass fatality disasters in the garment industry.
Unfortunately, North Face its parent company, VF Corporation, have refused to sign this groundbreaking agreement. Instead, the company has teamed up with its buddies from Walmart to create a fake safety program that excludes workers and is not legally binding.
Students and consumers are taking action at REI stores to demand that the company pull all North Face products from its shelves unless VF signs the Accord. Unfortunately, just this month REI said that it would not cut ties with North Face or meet with students to discuss the company’s human rights abuses. Now we’re stepping up the pressure to show REI that our demands can’t be ignored.
When: 12:30pm, Saturday, July 26th
Where: 1701 Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD 20852
SALW received a report back from a lobbying meeting of representatives of the Government of Bangladesh with United States Congress members. The meeting was held Tuesday and covered labor issues in Bangladesh’s garment sector. Apparently, no members of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Export Association (BGMEA) were there, contrary to what had previously been indicated.
In attendance were reps from the Bangladeshi American Democratic Caucus (BADC), the Bangladesh Medical Association of North America (BMANA), the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), the United States Department of Labor, the International Trade Council of the U.S. House of Representatives, The United States Trade Representative, staff from the office of U.S. Representative George Miller, and U.S. Senator Carl Levin.
The Bangladeshi government argued that progress to improve labor conditions in Bangladesh’s garment export industry was unprecedented. Using a presentation from the BGMEA, the government argued that an increase in costs to production could be passed along to workers. It requested that U.S. government officials visit Bangladesh in 2014 to meet with the BGMEA.
Senator Levin indicated that safety conditions had improved and some progress had been made on the implementation of laws for minimum wage, but that the Government of Bangladesh and the BGMEA were not taking worker organizing rights seriously enough. He said that he had met with Bangladesh Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed when the latter had visited, and that despite the meeting, Ahmed had punished worker representatives upon return to Bangladesh. Levin pointed out that because many families and workers are dependent on the income from garment work, the workers were made vulnerable. He said that he recognized that garment owners might not be accustomed to dealing with worker rights issues, but steps were necessary.
The Worker Rights Consortium representative said that he agreed that Bangladesh had made enormous economic progress in the garment sector to have become the 2nd largest producer of ready-made garments in the world, but that it’s important to remember that brands sourcing from Bangladesh, the Government of Bangladesh, and others have responsibilities. He pointed to recent violence against a union leader and said that violence against worker representatives indicated a serious problem that must be addressed.
Referencing a claim in the presentation from the BGMEA, the representative from the Worker Rights Consortium said that one of the figures was incorrect; contrary to the claim of the BGMEA that 21 factories had been shut down as a result of safety concerns, the WRC representative said that only 10 had been closed. He acknowledged that this meant workers were left without work, but argued that the concern over safety ought to be paramount in such instances. He also raised concerns that the BGMEA was not tolerating dissent from workers on important issues.
U.S. Congressperson George Miller’s staff member raised concerns that issues of repression against worker representatives were not being taken seriously enough and that the BGMEA and government were sending mixed messages with regard to a dispute at Pioneer. He said they were acting contrary to the interests of workers by, for example, publicly arguing that it was against the interests of the state for workers speaking up about labor issues.
The representative of the Government of Bangladesh said that it was BGMEA, not the Government of Bangladesh, that had made that claim and that the Commerce Minister was not aware of what happened at Pioneer.
The Government of Bangladesh representative said that Bangladesh is a newer country that has only been independent for 43 years. The rep asked for more time to resolve these issues.
Reactions?
On Tuesday, representatives of both the Bangladeshi government and an industry body for garment manufacturers and exporters will be lobbying members of the U.S. Congress. They will be looking to restore tariff benefits under the Generalized System of Preferences that have been suspended since last year by the Obama Administration. The benefits were suspended by the U.S. government shortly after the collapse of the Rana Plaza building left over 1,100 Bangladeshi garment workers dead in a preventable factory disaster.
The Bangladeshi government and BGMEA will be meeting with several Democratic Congress members, including John Conyers, Sander Levin, Gary Peters, George Miller, and Mike Honda, and the staff members of others, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Jerry Connolly, Sheila Jackson, and Keith Ellison. The parties will be discussing progress on a set of demands that the U.S. government has made of the Bangladeshi garment sector and the Bangladeshi government to improve safety and foster unionization.
A hasty return to better trade terms between Bangladesh and one of its main customers, the United States, would remove a substantial source of pressure currently pushing garment owners and the Bangladeshi government to allow improved working conditions and unionization. Such a step might also signal brands like Wal-Mart and Children’s Place that the U.S. government feels enough progress has been made to return to the status quo in trade terms when in fact much remains to be done on both building safety and worker rights in the Bangladeshi garment sector.
The meeting is being organized by a Bangladeshi diaspora group that seeks participation of the Bangladeshi community in the Democratic Party. Members of the media have also been invited.
As noted earlier this week, South Asia Citizens Web is carrying a new report entitled “Hindu Nationalism in the United States” (pdf). This report provides a 2014 snapshot of the sangh parivar‘s activities in the American diaspora. Unfortunately, useful as it is, the document lacks a compelling narrative that runs through it. It doesn’t tell a story; rather, it takes a clinical approach to outline the organizational structure of the Hindu right in the Untied States.
“Hindu Nationalism in the United States” builds off of previous reports (pdfs) on the Hindu right in the United States. The report looks at four categories of groups: Youth and Family Programs”; “Charitable Organizations”; “Academic and associated sites”; and “Sangh Leadership in Indo-American Communities”. The report provides figures for the amount of money spent by groups over the past 15 years in each of the first three categories, coming to $2.5 million, $55 million, and $1.9 million respectively.
Youth and Family Programs” covers activities aimed at indoctrinating young people and generating a diasporic community that is broadly sympathetic to the sangh and includes groups like Hindu Students Council and Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA). “Charitable funding” involves spending on service work in India and includes organizations like Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA and, again, the VHPA. “Academic and associated sites” frequently involves the funding of university-level research in a Hinduized framework such as through the “Hindu University of America”. “Public Campaigns” cover everything from the effort to sanitize California textbooks to fit Hindutva sensibilities to the work of Hindu American Foundation, which we have written about before.
Unfortunately, in reading the report, it is only infrequently that one feels like one is getting insight into what the sangh parivar is actually doing in the U.S. and what the impact of those actions are in South Asia and elsewhere. In one instance, the report points out that Hindu right educational activities in the U.S. are different in nature than those in India in a number of ways such as not including knife and stick fighting. As a result, says the report, “What remains…is that while attendees and their families may not be fully devoted to the Sangh’s supremacist politics, they ‘end up with a strong sympathy for the Sangh'”. These hints at an anthropological or psychological approach toward the sangh and the diaspora are important and tantalize the reader, but ultimately, the report leaves them hanging. In place of compelling storytelling, one gets lists and charts of organizations and little emphasis on what might appeal to a second generation reader. There is very little that is sexy about the report.
Now one might argue that I am asking too much of this report, that it is not designed to be a novel, but a tool for analysis, and that my critique is predominantly of style. However, given the report’s purpose, which is to combat sangh work, I would argue it needs to engage more directly with an audience that is in the diaspora- it is, after all, up to that diaspora whether to accept or reject the sangh’s work. As a lengthy analysis of how people in the diaspora are being manipulated to support sangh politics in India, the report doesn’t give someone in the diaspora enough reasons to care enough to read it. This is particularly the case since it is the third or fourth such lengthy analysis to be written in the past decade or so; at some point, these sorts of document have got to be made compelling to an audience that doesn’t already agree with them.
There are other issues that could be raised with the report, but I will cut myself off here. At the end of the day, we are better off for having access to “Hindu Nationalism in the United States”, but one wishes for a different kind of literature about the sangh and its activities in the global North than what we have been privy to over the past 15 years.
On June 15, a group of workers at Northbrook Jute Co. Ltd, of whom six have thus far been arrested, beat their CEO with iron rods and other heavy objects. The CEO later died from injuries sustained from the incident. So whose fault was this death at Northbrook?
As promised, South Asia Labor Watch has some follow up. This story is complicated; there are multiple narratives and it is extremely difficult to evaluate which ones are correct. On the one hand, the Trinamool Congress state government and the owners have tried to implicate ‘outside’ parties stirring up the workers to violence. Chief Minister Mamata Bannerjee has referred to ‘goons’ from the BJP and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) being involved. This type of party-led action or the use of outside instigators would not be new to West Bengal or India: each major party has its own trade union and labor issues are sometimes used in party politics. However, it would not be surprising if Bannerjee’s accusations are baseless as she has a tendency to blame the opposition before doing anything else. Similarly, those who have worked on labor issues know that owners are frequently wont to blame ‘outside agitators’ rather than looking at the conditions that they are responsible for creating.
On the other hand, this fact-finding report from the far left Trades Union Centre of India makes the claim that it was abusive conditions in the factory and the local industry that led the workers to rise up in protest and kill their boss. I encourage you to read this report, not only because its self-conscious emphasis on worker voice is more in line with SALW’s values than the ruling government’s, industry’s, or the media’s. In this, it seems a valuable complement to press reports as we try to learn what happened at Northbrook.
To close, two pieces of broader context: 1. The jute industry in West Bengal is in long run decline, partly due to the emergence of plastics as a replacement for jute bags. Jute has historically been an important crop in Bengal, but today the industry appears to subsist on government orders for domestically produced goods at this point. Pertinently, the trigger to this incident was a dispute over how many hours a week the factory would be open; the owner wanted to run it at 60% capacity while the workers wanted it at 100%, thereby earning 40 hours a week in wages. Similarly, one of the claims made against management are that it was illegally importing cheaper goods from Bangladesh and Nepal rather than employing workers at the West Bengal plant to make jute products.
2. India-wide industry has been reluctant to bring plants to West Bengal, pointing to incidents like these as providing an unfavorable environment for doing business. The actual historical and present day reasons why they’re not bringing work to West Bengal warrant a post of their own, but for now, it is enough to note that in recent years, there have been a number of high profile incidents in which labor-management relations broke down to the point of violence. It is unclear to me, though, that this is unique to West Bengal- day-to-day violence is endemic in India and takes many forms, though it may play out in a way that makes doing capitalism in West Bengal particularly difficult. What is important here is that the threat of worker violence is useful to Indian capitalists looking to gain more concessions in West Bengal; they can claim that they are doing the state and its people a favor by doing business there.
There is undoubtedly more to be said about this incident and its wider context, but SALW will leave it here for now.